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We are now half way through our year of trying to become green, so has anything changed over the last 6 months? I think it is time for a stock take.

Recycling: We have always been pretty good on the recycling front, but I think we are even better now – hardly anything goes in the bin that could go somewhere else, we recycle, compost, reuse, donate, freecycle etc.

Having just filled an 8 tonne skip with massive quantities of metal, plastic, material, wood, I think it’s important not only to consider what we buy, but also how we look after it, or pass it onto others to look after before they rot or go beyond repair.

It takes a massif amount of effort to explode rocks out of the ground and to reduce them to rubble and heat to make metal. It takes a fair amount of effort to extract oil from our sub-surface, and to chop down, season and refine those trees to turn them into tables and chairs etc.

Yesterday I was doing bag packing in Sainsbury’s as a fundraiser for my son’s playgroup. Seeing the copious amounts of food of all kinds that go into people’s trolleys made me think that if for some reason supermarket deliveries were hit by a crisis and stopped, we would all be in big trouble. Hardly any of us would have access to homegrown food, a lot of people wouldn’t know how to grow it and even if we learned to grow it we wouldn’t know how to cook it.

Some time ago I promised myself to stop ranting about big companies and their complete lack of responsibility when it comes to our planet. It gets quite boring and doesn’t spread good vibes. Yet after starting my post I realised this was exactly what I was doing again – somehow these companies keep winding me up. So in the spirit of not wanting to waste I have decided to publish this post anyway:

It is amazing the amount of ‘green’ stuff you find once you start looking. Going through some old mail I came across a link to ‘The Happy Planet Index’. Initially I thought it sounded like some hippie kind of thing – ‘lets all have a group hug and be a happy planet’, but it turned out that it was in fact a new way of calculating the state of the nation as opposed to the GDP figures normally used. www.happyplanetindex.org